


Know Your Own

by Stonestrewn



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Community: femslashex, F/F, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 17:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2475959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonestrewn/pseuds/Stonestrewn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Andrea, the youngest intern at the Terra 5 Grand Archive, is tasked with supervising the eichid ensign for an intercultural exchange, her monotonous workdays are forever disrupted. The entirely alien Gro fascinate and intrigue her and they soon become friends - and more. Andrea falls in love. </p>
<p>But the more Andrea finds out about the eichids and the hostilities between her and Gro's people, the less the history she has been taught makes sense. There are things that just don't add up. There's something Gro isn't telling her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Know Your Own

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BatchSan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BatchSan/gifts).



> A billion thanks to beta readers Laura, Serena and Mona, and especially Kit who sat on skype with me for two days straight reading snippets and cheerleading.

The first time they meet, in the entrance hall of the Grand Archive, she cups her hands before Andrea’s face and her fingers weep their translucent secretions into the bowl of her palms. The eichids don’t smile but the ruff at her jaw is fanned out fully and the fringe atop her head stands friendly and tall. The finger-bowl fills to the brim, just short of spilling, and she raises it higher, nudging Andrea’s lips. There’s absolutely no expression in her glossy, bulbous eyes.

Andrea throws a panicked glance at her supervisor, who nods imperceptibly, a tension in his frame that leaves no way out that doesn’t mean dismissal. The eichid nudges her once more and with a shiver she can’t fully suppress, Andrea parts her lips.

The fingers have no nails. The tips are all smooth, round, slightly spongy flesh and the absence of keratin edge is unsettling, demotes the impression of familiar hand to illusion and leaves her facing some frighteningly foreign five-pronged organ. Andrea keeps her head still nonetheless and when the the liquid seeps into her mouth she presses her tongue down and lets it happen.

It’s colorless and clear but the taste is salty and organically tangy, the texture a little thick. She tries not to dwell on the sensations, swallows quickly, prays that this is all that’s expected of her. The eichid, thankfully, lowers her hands. All her ruffs and ridges flare, and then she splashes the remainder over her head without blinking, splattering the fir wood floor with indecent puddles.

Despite this irregular performance the room relaxes. Andrea’s supervisor runs a hand over his beard in a gesture of relief.

“My gratitude for that you receive me,” the eichid says, awkward both in her turn of phrase and pronunciation. She speaks almost entirely in her throat, struggling with the consonants. Inflicting English on her is surely an act of cruelty. She might have had an easier time with some other language, or a speaking aid, but English is the rule in the archive and one eichid is not likely to change it.

“Thank you,” Andrea says, a little thickly. Her tongue feels coated in mucus, still.

The eichid twitches at the sound. She tilts her head and the jaw ruff folds in, then flares out halfway, and this must be a prelude to everything going wrong because the supervisor interrupts with a ragged jauntiness.

“Right! We’re very pleased to welcome you for this, ah, exchange. I’m sure you’ll want to get started right away - _your_ supervisor will show you to your desk,” he says, and it takes Andrea a few seconds to realize he means her.

\--

She hopes the eichid doesn’t understand what a slight this is. To be sent by official decree, rank as high as a diplomat, and be assigned to the intern - it’s insult verging on provocation. Andrea understands now why she wasn’t informed of the eichid’s arrival. That would have given her time to hand in a formal refusal.

The eichid arranges herself gingerly on the spinny chair, eyeing the computer screen before her with the same unreadable expression she’s worn since she arrived. Andrea tries to cut her glances short so as to avoid staring. She’s never seen an eichid in the flesh before. She doesn’t know anyone who has.

There are a billion questions she wants to ask but sends them all away to research alone later, keeping only the one she can be sure will not be rude:

“What’s your name?”

“Gro.” The syllable rumbles warmly in the eichid’s chest. “You?”

“Andrea.”

Gro tries it out under her breath a couple of times before offering up:

“Angyea?”

In Gro’s mouth, it sounds like a bubble bursting. Andrea smiles.

“Sure.”

\--

Their physical similarities only underline how alien Gro is. She has legs and arms and a face with all the expected features, a flat chested torso of human proportions, but her silhouette could never be mistaken for such. The many trembling membranes and spines protruding all over her body ensure this. Besides the neck ruff that follows her jawline like a beard and the head fringe that continues down her spine to flare out in a short but broad fan-like tail of see-through membrane, she has blunt, skin-covered cartilage spikes framed with thin, fleshy tendrils at nearly every joint and irregular ridges, some crowned with a sort of flexible plate, all over her shoulders and head. Her skin is patterned in spots and freckles, shifting from a creamy yellow to deep, reddish brown. The fringe and tendrils are purple. It’s beautiful, in a sense, and always on display. If her shape didn’t already make wearing clothes difficult, the moisture would. Eichids are amphibious, this much Andrea knows. Gro is always covered in a layer of thin mucus, leaving stains on her seat and footprints down the hallway.

_Eichids are able to control the substances secreted through their skin, usually preferring to keep their hands dry as it facilitates manual interaction with electronics and other objects in their day-to-day lives_ , the online encyclopedia article tells Andrea once she’s paid the additional fee for accessing a website outside of her standard internet package. _The skin has a respiratory function and can absorb water, particularly the pelvic area._

Andrea’s cheeks burn. With Gro always naked it is hard to keep her gaze from falling to her crotch. Eichids don’t have genitals in the same sense as her own species but the shapes are enough alike. The mound between Gro’s legs is adorned with the same tendrils and fringes as the rest of her, albeit in miniature, and they’re constantly trembling like leaves in the wind. It’s all painfully eye catching.

Besides the most obviously physiological, there isn’t much information in the article. The section on culture is only a few sentences long and concludes with:

_Eichids have long been considered a critically endangered race, but today a small, mostly self-governing enclave is settled on the moon orbiting Terra 5. The precise cause for the disappearance of the race remains uncertain as very few eichid historical documents survive, though it is widely assumed to have been the result of a plague. What few records remain are held in the Terra 5 Grand Archive._

Andrea sips tea and turns on a radio documentary to ease her into research mode. It’s one of the specials on Old Terra, history of a place as far away as to be a fairy tale.

What she finds is the same biology lesson repeated over and over, all based off of old records of dissection and the preserved cadavers at the Institute for Extraterrestrial Biology. Any content that might be worth something is behind a paywall and she’s already strained her budget today. At one point she thinks she’s on to something but then the browser extension warning her about Resinfo trackers sends an alert that her activity is being reported, and she reluctantly backtracks. She really can’t afford the fines.

The search is frustrating enough to keep her engrossed entirely, and it’s well past midnight before she goes to bed. Once there, her head hardly so much as touches the pillow before she throws off the covers with a curse and gets to the kitchen for the medication she almost forgot. The bottle is large but rattles hollowly as Andrea pours one of the oblong white pills into her palm. She hesitates, takes a knife out of a drawer and cuts the pill in two. She swallows one half and leaves the other half on the sink for tomorrow.

\--

The next morning is crusted over with fatigue like ice on a puddle. Andrea shivers despite the sweater, chilled from within rather than from the rainy walk from the subway. She’s gulping coffee and chewing listlessly on a slightly dry cheese sandwich when Gro comes in, a bright flash of color even under the washed out fluorescent lighting.

“Good morning,” she says in her peculiar accent, and today her blank face doesn’t seem as unnerving.

“Good morning,” Andrea replies. “Ready to get started for real?”

Gro nods, a twitchy movement sure to have been recently learned.

Her presence is a break in the usual work routine, and a welcome one. As an intern, Andrea sits at the lowest rung of the ladder, doing unskilled, monotonous work. Mentoring Gro gives her a sense of real responsibility, a challenge to face, however hollow it may have been intended to ring when assigned to her. When she goes to refill her coffee mug around eleven, the chill and sullenness have dissipated completely.

Along with her usual caution. She doesn’t keep an ear out for voices, and as she gets to the pantry Markus and Anna are both idling by the microwave, chatting the workday away. Andrea’s shoulders tense.

“Hey,” Markus says when he spots her. It’s the first time he has addressed her first. Usually he treats her the way most handsome men treat women they don’t consider attractive: like inconveniently placed furniture. “Where’s your new pet?”

There’s no need for him to clarify who he means. Anna swats him on the arm but her smile is too wide for the implied shock to be anything but a false alibi.

“She’s not a pet,” Andrea says. “Her name is Gro.”

Markus snorts with laughter equally eager and dismissive.

“No, but,” he says, “don’t you know what it means when they make you drink their hand jizz? It’s about submission. Mating ritual shit.” He smirks. “Not that I think you’d be desperate enough to fuck a frog, but _if_...”

_“Markus,”_ Anna wheezes, the outrage a little more real, but if there was a protest to follow it dies on her lips.

“She’s not a pet,” Andrea repeats, louder this time, louder than she’s ever made her voice heard within the walls of the Grand Archive. She sets her mug down on the counter with a hard clang and returns to her desk without a second cup. Anger will keep her alert, anyhow.

\--

Gro doesn’t even resemble a frog. If anything she looks like a tropical fish or an extravagant salamander, but a comparison to any animal is unfair - offensive, even. In the obligatory first nine years of the educational system they covered eichids only in biology class, when learning about humanoids, most of them non-sapient. Andrea only heard of them as members of another civilization during university prep as part of an advanced history class, and then all they really covered was the plague leading to planetary extinction and first contact. The textbook described the eichids like mythical creatures rather than a historical people, tragic figures of a time long gone. She doesn’t know if upper education went more in depth. She specialized in digital archeology.

“Keep an eye on her,” the supervisor says in passing under his breath, his hand gripping her arm too hard, nails digging in.

As if she could do anything but. Gro stands out like spilled wine on a table cloth.

It’s nice to have some company, however unusual. The desk beside Andrea’s has been unoccupied since she was installed over a year ago. The first day Gro sits in the lunch room during meal time, but after having returned with an agitated shiver in her tail she follows Andrea’s example and eats at her desk.

“What are those?” Andrea can’t help asking of the iridescent, many-colored pebbles in Gro’s plastic bento box, purchased here on Terra 5 and with a picture of a unicorn on the lid.

There’s no Terran equivalence but with a mixture of English and pantomime Gro manages to communicate that it’s some sort of insect. Gro grinds dried and brittle seaweed-like leaves between her blunt teeth throughout the workday - this must be the protein part of her diet.

When Gro offers Andrea a taste she accepts the handful of pearly bugs poured into her spoon with curiosity. They’re not as crunchy as she expected and much sweeter.

“I should give you more,” Gro says, apologetic, “but I have only so much that it lasts for me so long I am here.”

“Don’t worry about it, please,” Andrea says. “And thanks. They’re quite good.”

It’s absurd that a government agent on a diplomatic mission should spend her days in the background, attended only by an unpaid intern. Andrea is all too aware of the neglect her superiors have shown and keep showing in making Gro welcome at the archive. She does what she can to remedy.

When she catches Gro squirming in discomfort and scratching dry patches on her skin, Andrea goes out and buys a detachable shower head for the bathroom so Gro can get the moisture she needs during work hours. She keeps bottles of sparkling water on hand and plugs in the small electric heater from her apartment beside Gro’s desk - the outer wall of the workspace area is all glass and it can get quite cold in winter. Her efforts are received with a surprise which only heightens Andrea’s embarrassment on behalf of her institution.

The days pass easily like this, with work and conversations that are amicable and easygoing if often cut short by the language barrier. The nature of Gro’s work never ceases to interest. Once introduced to the system of the Grand Archive and the methods of Terran archivists, the tablets were brought up from the restricted vaults and Gro plugged in her own equipment. Tablets - because eichids seldom record anything in writing, most of their cultures being ones of oral tradition, but when they do they use what mostly resembles large panes of frosted glass.

At first glance they’re blank. Not until Gro has let her fingers drip all over the surface, thoroughly and evenly wetting it, does the writing appear. To Andrea’s untrained eye it looks mostly like irregular blotches. Asking Gro reveals them to be a kind of pictogram.

“Each form is different,” Gro says, “and means different things in different language. It depends also on which other signs stands beside. One can mean many different, it depends entirely.”

A system similar enough to that of several human languages and possible to learn. The reason the tablets have never been read since they were found has to do with the script not reacting to anything but eichidal secretions. The necessary component hasn’t been found.

“These here are the earliest history of one culture settled on this here planet. It says about a war and after that a long peace. The people were scolded by the water because it came blood in it and water wants be clean. They signed peace between each other which made the water happy and put little bit of its life into the growing things so that we can live on them instead for to hunt and eat each other. Says the history,” Gro says.

She reads the plates with reverence, painstakingly typing an English translation for the benefit of the archive. She sends each for Andrea to proofread, answering questions about difficult to understand sentences and concepts that need explanatory footnotes. Andrea sends them back to Gro and deletes the copies off her drive. The need for secrecy and limiting any related documents to just the one has been stressed heavily by her supervisor.

“Our history is like our blood,” Gro says. “It explains us. It tells our future. We need it for to live. Only some few knew of the whole, when we still were all.”

The sanctity and religious restrictions surrounding the tablets puts a little more sense into to the secrecy, though it also puts a sense of trepidation into Andrea’s translating. None of this was ever meant for her eyes, but when she timidly breaches the subject Gro shakes her head, tendrils dancing.

“I have chosen to share with you for that this here exchange can happen. It is courteous of your government to let us get these despite that we used to attack you for long ago,” Gro says. The hostility goes back over a century, to the early days of colonizing. The planet was already depopulated when humans first landed but settling still brought on a wave of terrorist attack by those eichids living on the space stations in orbit who survived the planetside plague. The intergalactic courts made giving up the moon to the eichids a non-negotiable term when granting colonization rights, but they’ve never been friendly neighbors to one another. It’s quite out of proportion on the human side, Andrea thinks.

This is supposed to be a gesture of trust and a first step towards a future of cooperation and integration. The archive will get its translation and the eichids will get a small part of their history back, that’s the deal. Not the original tablets, of course, they will remain on Terra. The isolated remnants of eichid society don’t have the necessary resources to ensure their preservation, is the official statement.

“It is understandable,” is all Gro says about it, her eyes fixed on the copy scanner.

‘Scanner’ doesn’t do the contraption justice - it’s an advanced piece of technology rather different from any Andrea has ever encountered before and effectively proves the representation of eichids as wretched, primitive beings living in deceased squalor a lie. Gro places a blank tablet, one of the many she brought, on the simple, flat plate which constitutes one half of the scanner. She covers the glass tablet with a fine green sand and writes with the drops from her fingers, into the grains. After copying one tablet this way she picks up scanner part number two, a plate identical to the first save for the fact that one side of it lights up. Gro places it carefully atop the sand covered tablet, flicks a switch and waits for the coldly intense light to burn the writing into the glass. Excess sand is brushed away, once it’s done.

“We have long been without our past,” Gro says, sprinkling sand over a blank sheet of glass, “and without leaders. The history bearers were always our light, they led us and knew everything. When they died we lost people and we lost glue. Now we float in pieces and we know not how to swim.”

“I’m sorry,” Andrea says, uselessly.

Gro says nothing. Her fingers weep into the sand.

\--

Then comes the morning when the pill bottle is as empty as her bank account and the lump in her throat can’t be swallowed down.

Andrea argues with her fluttering pulse all the way to work: she can handle it this time, if she eats and sleeps like she should, and she’s been going on half the dose for two months, it could be fine.

She sleeps and eats like she should until she doesn’t. She handles it until she can’t.

Her speeding heartbeat keeps her awake long past midnight and starts racing before she opens her eyes in the morning. Her appetite wanes to nearly nothing and when the hunger begins to hurt she goes to bed in an attempt to escape it. She sits by the computer without seeing the screen, ears intent on every little sound out in the entryway, paranoia amplifying each one into a murderer or thief or nameless horror. The sounds sneak into her nightmares to poison what sleep she can get. When the fits of sadness hit her it’s a punch in the gut that has her gasping for air. She cries loud, mouth gaping, her face pressed into a pillow, for the neighbors’ sake.

Work is mostly fine. She dabs concealer over her pimples and goes twice as many coffee rounds. Sometimes she escapes to the bathroom to sit on the toilet seat with her eyes closed and just breathe, but when she smiles at Gro she always means it. Work is mostly fine, until it isn’t.

She’s on an upswing of the brain pendulum, so her guard is down when the crying starts in the middle of the afternoon and her throat tightens abruptly. She flees into the bathroom at the first tear falling, but the minutes slip away while she pulls at her own hair and how loud is she being? A co-worker finding her like this would be catastrophic. She needs to pull herself together long enough to call in sick and go home. An hour and a half at most. Then, she can cry.

Andrea opens the bathroom door and there stands Gro, staring into her puffy, reddened eyes.

“You are sick. I call an ambulance,” Gro says, her always monotone voice without any trace of alarm, but her movements are hurried as she turns back towards their desks. Andrea lunges after her in panic, grabs her wrist and pulls her into the bathroom, locking the door behind them.

“No, Gro-! I’m not,” she lowers her voice to a whisper, “I’m not sick.”

Gro crouches a bit, puts their faces on the same level, and scrutinizes Andrea’s blotchy face as if analyzing a particularly complicated paragraph.

“Sad,” she concludes at last, and Andrea nods. “You were in here long. I started worry.”

“I’m sorry,” Andrea says, and every ridge and tendril and spine on Gro’s body twitches. She sidles up close and wraps an arm around Andrea’s shoulder. Her mucus immediately soaks through the t-shirt and she twitches away, but a second later she’s back, squeezing. The damp isn’t uncomfortable - Gro is very warm.

“Tell me. Was the tall man mean to you?”

“Markus?”

“I can easily hurt him if it needs.”

“He didn’t do anything,” Andrea says, wishing he had. Gro beating up Markus would be something to see. “I get like this sometimes.”

“Often?”

“Sometimes. More when I’m off my meds.”

“Take your medicine,” Gro says, and even with the lack of inflection and expression Andrea can tell she’s being scolded.

“I’m out,” Andrea says. Shame is giving way to a kind of mortified relief. It’s almost nice to be found out and berated. A little less lonely.

“Buy more!” Gro touches her cheek, strokes her chin. “Be careful of yourself. Take care of this body and of this mind.”

“I’m.. out of money, too,” Andrea says. “Interns don’t get paid and the state funding isn’t a lot, so…”

Gro is shaking slightly. Her hold tightens for a brief moment before letting go, taking Andrea by the hand instead.

“Come. I will buy for you.”

“You really don’t have to,” Andrea says. She means it, she really does, but Gro is close and she’s stark and beautiful and Andrea’s resolve is steadily evaporated by her warmth.

“I want to choose to be kind to you.” Her ruff droops. “Please let me.”

\--

The pharmacist has his mouth slightly open for the duration of their visit, from Gro walking briskly up to the counter, cutting in line before five other people by claiming an emergency and going untested, to taking out as many bottles as Andrea’s receipt will allow.

“Thank you,” she says to the cashier after paying in cash and loudly declares to the pharmacy at large: “I apologize but it was an emergency.”

She’s excited, Andrea thinks, and it’s infectious. Normally she would be embarrassed by such a scene as the one just now but with Gro, what’s the point? She draws attention from everyone by simply existing.

“Here,” Gro says once they’re back outside, thrusting the plastic bag in Andrea’s hands.

“I don’t know what to say. You’re a lifesaver.”

Gro’s ruff is fanned out wide and her back is very straight. She pats Andrea’s head, looking down at her.

“I thought we are friends. Was that right?”

“Yes,” Andrea says, and the happiness that has been pooling in her belly ever since they snuck away from the archive floods her every limb as the dam bursts and her heart overflows. She rises up on her toes and pats Gro back, somewhat awkwardly because of the fringe but Gro tips her head so Andrea can reach better so she must not mind much. They stand like that for half a minute or so, Andrea smiling and Gro flared to the fullest.

“We should probably go back to the archive,” Andrea says at last, reluctantly.

“No,” Gro says. She points to the café next to the pharmacy. “We should go there.”

\--

Gro orders nine different pastries, asking the girl behind the counter for detailed descriptions of everything the place has to offer before choosing the most colorful ones. Andrea marvels at her appetite until they’ve crammed themselves into a booth in the back and she realizes they’re all for her.

“I die if I eat sugar,” Gro says with an air of real grief. “Describe them to me.”

Andrea is not unhappy to oblige. They spend an hour focused on the pastries and tea, Andrea eating and Gro smelling, poking and interrogating Andrea about taste and texture. Six of them, including a strawberry eclair and a thing of mostly whipped cream covered in neon green marzipan made to resemble a gaping frog, are as many as Andrea manages in their entirety; for the remaining, Gro must coax her into taking one bite of each.

“I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just raspberry. It’s sweet and kind of sour and when I don’t feel like I’m about to throw up, it’s really tasty,” Andrea says.

“Sweet and sour, _how?_ ” Gro says, and Andrea buries her head in her hands.

“You saved my life just to kill me,” she groans, and then sputters as Gro maneuvers a spoon in between her palms and mashes custard against her lips. “You _have_ to stop that, and also _give me those!_ ” Gro is holding the napkins out of reach until Andrea finally stops laughing and licks her lips clean to give a full custard report.

At long last Gro is satisfied, presiding over the clutter of plates and cake remnants on the table like a general over a victorious battlefield. Andrea leans back in her seat, her stomach full almost to the point of pain. She’s never done anything like this before - a lot of people won’t look too kindly at a fat girl stuffing her face in public. With Gro, though, it felt easy, like anyone who disapproved of her having a good time could eat their own asses and get lost.

They get refills three times over, the waitress smiling at their excess and Andrea smiling back, and stay and talk for hours, more freely that they would within the walls of the Grand Archive.

“We learn almost nothing about you,” Andrea says. “I think because you’re all Resinfo.” Gro blinks at the words, so she explains: “Restricted information. There’s a government block on some information, like you can’t access some things without clearance or you get fined. It goes way back, to before I was born. Sometimes it’s necessary, probably, when it’s subjects we don’t know a lot about and could cause mass anxiety, or when it’s stuff that needs to be preserved. But you’re so close. It’s absurd how little we get to know.” She swallows, darts a glance at Gro. “I get… I mean I get if you don’t want us to know everything, or really… be all up in your business. Even if the planet was already empty when we first got here, I personally don’t think it’s as clear-cut as us just getting to take it. The intergalaxy court ruled in favor, but I dunno…”

Gro sips her tea in silence long enough for Andrea to get anxious she’s said something offensive.

“Why may you not learn?” she says at last.

“There’s never been an official statement on it,” Andrea says, relieved to see the conversation resumed, “which is weird. I think it’s because the whole colonization process was kind of shady. We definitely took advantage of your tragedy,” she adds when Gro looks up. “I think it’s a combination of not wanting people to question human expansion mixed with a dose of general exotification.”

“You do it with yourself also,” Gro says, and Andrea can’t do much but agree.

“With more contact that’s bound to have to change. I hope it does.” Her insides flutter as she adds: “I’m really glad I got to meet you.”

“I am glad also,” Gro says. She looks Andrea in the eyes and the expression in them is as always blank, but her ruff waves, speaks in a language Andrea never knew existed before.

“Is it okay if I ask, though,” she says, sheepish. “I’m really sorry I don’t know anything about this, but when we first met, what was that thing you did about? When you made me drink the...when you made me drink.”

“Trust,” Gro says.

“Trust?”

“I show that I am ready to trust you by giving little of myself. You take little of me to show you can take me in and understand me,” Gro explains. She tilts her head. “Can I ask why you did say thank you after? No one does so with us.”

“Oh, I… I was just feeling awkward.”

“Why?”

“Well, we don’t really exchange body fluids in public here.”

“You do.”

“What? No, we don’t. Do we?” Andrea says, genuinely perplexed.

“With the mouths.” Gro leans forward over the table like she’s sharing information that’s classified or scandalous or both. “You put the mouths together and you mix it all around. _In_ the mouths.”

“You mean kissing?” Andrea almost laughs. “I guess you’re right. I guess we do that sometimes.”

“What is it for?”

“It depends a little where you’re from, here it usually is to show you love someone romantically.”

“ _In_ the mouths,” Gro repeats.

“You can kiss with lips closed, too,” Andrea says, and has to stifle another laugh when Gro relaxes with obvious relief.

They leave a little after that, saying goodbye outside the café. It’s already dark and Andrea decides to walk instead of taking the bus. The weather isn’t too cold and it isn’t raining, for once, and her feet are light with gladness. She thinks about the day, about the cake and the conversation. She thinks about what it would be like to kiss Gro, and then she thinks _oh no_.

\--

Through the insular fog of unmedication Andrea didn’t notice, but many of her co-workers have gone away. Markus is transferred, Anna laid off, and there are unfamiliar faces wherever she looks. The supervisor’s eyes shift when she brings up the subject as roundabout as she can.

“Ah, it’s,” he says, fiddling with his phone, “restructuring, directives from up high. Less resources these days, we’re having to cut down on personnel, very unfortunate. The economy, not much to do about it but don’t worry, you’re not threatened at all, not in the least.”

Andrea tries not to, though the cracks in the everyday fill her with unease. She’s been here before, where her brain concocts impossible plots of destruction centered on her for outlandish reasons. She doesn’t want to go back to that place so she greets every new face as friendly as she can and nags right back at the nagging little voice in her head.

As the intern it would have made sense for her to get kicked out first of all, but since she has no pay and is as involved with Gro as she is, Andrea supposes it’s easier to keep her for now. Soon, all the desks surrounding her and Gro’s stand empty and, really, it suits her just fine.

\--

She’s in love with Gro.

She’s in love with Gro even though she knows that ultimately nothing will happen, nothing can happen, this is a temporary state. Once the eichids have what they need Gro will leave and the chances they will ever see each other again are slim. There are no public channels to any of the moons.

Andrea still holds her love like a precious pearl. It lends a shimmer to her days, gives her a surge of joy when she gets to greet Gro in the morning. It has her laboring in the kitchen each evening to bring new, increasingly imaginative foods for lunch so Gro can experience them second-hand. Each day is bright and solid and she savours the seconds without thinking ahead.

The drive to find out more about the eichids gets stronger. She wants to understand Gro, as much as she possibly can. The longer they go the more the onesidedness of their communication shames her, Andrea thinks.

She goes in several hours early to work a gloomy Wednesday morning, ready to put her archeology degree to use for the first time in years. There are no eichid dictionaries in the libraries and even if there’s anything in the restricted vaults, they’re inaccessible for someone with her level of clearance. Andrea fills up the thermos she brought with hot coffee and opens a bag of salmiak. Her hope is to find something old enough for the Resinfo deletions to have glossed over the site, or for sites obscure enough to slip through the block. She takes off her shoes, wraps herself up in a big, cozy cardigan and knit scarf and gets to work. There’s a significant risk of official reprimands or worse, accessing Resinfo at work, but Andrea tells herself her current involvement with the eichid exchange may if not excuse so at least explain her actions and temper the punishment.

She doesn’t quite believe her own reassurances, but it doesn’t matter. She wouldn’t be able to afford the search at home, anyhow, much less the inevitable fines.

The sun is rising before she finally finds something worthwhile. It’s an old forum, deserted ages ago. It used to be a place for exploration contractors, the first people to touch down on inhabitable planets. Most of the threads date from the years 2155 to -58, just past the initial stages of settling on Terra 5. This is where Andrea strikes gold.

User “ _brutus23_ ” is asking about eichid body language. _I heard somewhere 75% of their language was physical_ , they write. Their peers chime in with varying levels of expertise.

_2155-10-18 - 19:08 - USER:drakis_  
 _hi brutus23! in my experience its all in the fins?_

_2155-10-18 - 19:15 - USER:hyperion_  
 _LOL what experience_

_2155-10-18 - 19:17 - USER:humblebumble_  
 _Not sure this is relevant to this subforum. Mods?_

_2155-10-18 - 19:32 - USER:HugoMorenos_  
 _When I was a kid there was an eichid pond system close to my parents’ camp - they were part of the anthropological first scout missions on the planet surface, you can google it if you haven’t heard - and we had some contact. I still have some of the reference sheets they used back then, if you’re interested?_

_2155-10-18 - 19:32 - USER:brutus23_  
 _@HugoMorenos_  
 _Yeah, thanks!_

_2155-10-18 - 19:33 - USER:drakis_  
 _@hyperion_  
 _OMG LOL!!!! are you terranovan or what_

Andrea’s heart beats hard. An eichid settlement on the planet? After humans landing? All she’s heard, all she’s read, has been quite clear on eichids already having gone extinct on Terra 5 proper. First contact was with the few populations in orbit and the anthropological teams were there to salvage what little remained of their cultures.

She skims the ensuing argument between drakis and hyperion, an escalation of insults where novahyperion is bitterly accused of lacking spacer experience and drakis is accused of lying with equal vehemence. On the third page of the thread HugoMorenos resurfaces.

_2155-10-18 - 20:21 - USER:HugoMorenos_  
 _@brutus23_  
 _Here you go. It’s really a shame about the plague, I have nothing but fond memories of our neighbors back then._  
 _ATTCH: eichexpr1.xrt_  
 _ATTCH: eichexpr2.xrt_  
 _ATTCH: greetingsetc.xrt_

The files are still downloadable. An obsolete format, but once it’s on her drive Andrea can probably reformat and print. There are a few more links in subsequent comments but when she tries clicking on one of them the screen flashes with a surveillance alert. Andrea jumps in her seat and hurries to log out.

She’s returning to her seat with a pile of print-outs in her hands when the first co-workers come in for the day.

\--

Andrea thrums with anxiety all through the night, imagining increasingly elaborate scenarios where she is fined or fired or incarcerated or worse, but greeting Gro the next morning and knowing that the quick fanning of her ruff is a response to seeing someone dear to you makes it all worth it.

“I’m sorry I haven’t looked into it earlier,” Andrea says. Gro is thumbing through the pile of papers with an expressionless face but a very pleased tail. “It shouldn’t be just you trying to understand me.”

She takes the papers back when Gro hands them back to her. Every little fin on her is wagging slightly.

“You’re...laughing. Okay,” Andrea says. “With me or at me?”

“Never at,” Gro says, and nudges her chin. “You have barely understood me at all this far, so?”

“You’ve made yourself understood well enough, I think. If you’re worrying about not being articulate enough, that’s never been a huge problem,” Andrea says. “I know this comes late, but… I just want to know more about you. The effort shouldn’t be this one-sided.”

Gro is silent for a little while. She always withdraws into quietude whenever talk of her species closes in on present day specifics, making Andrea falter. She doesn’t want to trample where she isn’t welcome and lay tender ground to ruin.  
.  
“I learned me from sheets like these here,” Gro says suddenly. “To read of you.”

“Yeah.” Andrea nods. “It makes sense you would get info for the exchange.”

“No. Before that.”

“You learn about humans? Like in school?” It’s embarrassing that the thought never occurred to her. “What’s the regular eichid taught about us?”

“More than you are,” Gro says.

As she turns back to her scanner her ruff gives nothing away.

\--

There’s a man at Andrea’s desk.

It’s after closing - she forgot her umbrella under her desk and went back to retrieve it, and there’s a man sitting at her desk, logged in to her account. She can see the desktop over his shoulder, the picture of a hortensia she took at the botanical garden. His hair is cropped short and he looks frighteningly normal in a white shirt and jeans.

Her pulse is speeding but she gathers herself up to go and confront whatever is about to befall her, when the supervisor steps in her way.

“Andrea,” he says, and his voice is cheerful but his brows are furrowed. “You’re in late.”

“Um,” Andrea says, momentarily thrown off.

The supervisor grabs her wrist and she winces. His grip is hard and his nails dig painfully into her skin. He drags her into the corridor, towards the higher offices, talking the whole time.

“I thought we could talk, I’ve been meaning to… hear how things have been proceeding.”

This is it, Andrea thinks. The restricted search is coming back to bite her at last. The average citizen might get away with it but an archive official, entrusted to safeguard information, must respect the regulations and now the career she hasn’t even started is coming to a halt.

“You’re.. doing well? We have been talking of the possibility of raising your subsidy, that is, sending in the paperwork. You must know we value your work here. Were a position to open up, then surely…”

The supervisor blathers on and on, to Andrea’s increasing confusion. He stops outside the superintendent’s empty office, seemingly at a loss for where or how to continue. His hand is still clutching Andrea’s wrist. She tugs a little at it but he disregards the hint. His forehead is damp with sweat.

“The- The eichid? The exchange is turning out to your mutual satisfaction? That’s good. That’s very good. We appreciate the work you do, we absolutely appreciate your… your hand with her. Well done, indeed.”

“Am I in trouble?” Andrea interrupts, keeping her tone even only through great effort. Her bones protest the vice of his fingers cramped around her.

“Trouble? No,” the supervisor says. “No, of course not.”

He lets go of her with a start, as if he only now became aware of the grip. Giving her a look she can’t interpret, he says:

“Take care, Andrea.”

She runs back to her desk and she doesn’t care if it’s silly, if it makes the receptionist stare. There’s an indistinct fear burning at the back of her throat and her wrist aches.

Her chair is empty and her computer turned off. She slams her palm on the power button, waiting with her heartbeat pounding on her eardrums, gripping the desk. _You’ve been here before_ , she tells herself. _None of what you think is happening right now is really real_ , but her stomach still churns and when she finally has her password typed in and the hortensia fills the screen she clicks on the activity log in a frantic hurry.

There’s nothing registered. Not since she logged out this afternoon.

She touches the seat of her chair and it’s still warm. The nail marks on her skin still smart.

\--

Nothing makes sense and Andrea can’t stop the slide toward obsession.

She feels stares at the back of her neck no matter how many times she tells herself it’s nothing but brain ghosts. She takes to ridiculous rituals like leaving strands of hair on her keyboard or marking the position of the mouse with a piece of translucent tape. She scours through all the files on her computer for anything out of the ordinary and she avoids the supervisor as best she can.

_You’ve been here before_ , she repeats to herself like a mantra - and yet. She catches movement out of the corner of her eye when she turns around. The hairs disappear. The number of sendfiles don’t match her own count and the supervisor hovers where he used to never quite see her at all.

_You’ve been here before_ , Andrea chants in her head, but her teeth are gritted and her days glazed with a sticky coating of dread.

It’s souring her last precious days with Gro but she can’t leave it be. Her brain is snagging on details and she loses hours to pacing around her apartment with a cooling cup of tea in her hands, turning over the facts for the hundredth time.

Nothing makes sense about the past of the eichids. She checks out history books from the library and bookmarks any site that’s accessible to her and they all say the same thing: the eichids were no longer on the planet when humans arrived. The few that survived the plague had already left the planet to settle on the nearby planetoids. Then the eichid waves of terrorism after the intergalactic courts approved human colonization of Terra 5, and the unsteady truce, the granting of the moon and monitored independence.

But HugoMorenos lived next to a settlement as a child. His parents were studying them, even though all data is supposed to have been post-plague. It was supposed to have been part of the preservation program to gather what little remained of eichid cultures, the charitable effort that made the violence in response all the more abhorrent. You can’t colonize an inhabited planet, abandonment is the only exception to the rule. Nothing makes sense and the further she pursues this line of thought the more the sinking feeling in her stomach intensifies.

It’s the second to last day of the exchange. The glass tablets lie in two neat stacks on Gro’s otherwise cleared desk. Tomorrow they will take a formal farewell with the full archive personnel assembled but these are their own goodbyes, the ones that truly matter.

Andrea holds Gro as tightly as she can without poking herself on one of her spines and doesn’t give a damn at the way the mucus moisture stains her dress. Gro hugs her back just as hard, drooping all over, and knowing that the parting is a mutual sorrow is the saddest gladness Andrea has ever felt.

They stay entwined for several minutes, and even when the hug finally breaks up they’re still close, neither willing to put much distance between them. Andrea can feel Gro’s warmth, the subdued, mossy scent of her skin.

“Gro,” she says quietly. “What was the plague that killed your people?”

Like all the other times, Gro doesn’t answer. She puts three fingertips on Andrea’s chest, gathered to a point, and when Andrea pulls away her touch gives no chase.

\--

The ceremony takes place in the entrance to the Grand Archive, the two of them face to face and long rows of faces Andrea can’t put names to to either side. She raises a cup of sparkling water for Gro to drink in lieu of any passable secretions of her own, handing back the trust instilled in her all those months ago.

Eyes bore into her, weighing heavy on the scene. It should be a day of celebration, this is a historical moment, but the atmosphere is solemn, tense. The supervisor doesn’t speak and very few of her newly appointed colleagues speak. Most unsettlingly, Gro is entirely still.

Not one of her tendrils flutter, none of her fringes flare. Her ruff lies flat along with her tail and every other expressive protrusion on her body. In all the time Andrea has known her she has never presented herself like this, pinned down and stiff like a tree with all its leaves shed. The effect is eerie, sending shivers down Andrea’s spine.

“Thank you,” she says, as awkward as on that first day, once Gro has swallowed the mouthful of water and formally ended their collaboration and then she can’t suppress a gasp.

Gro smiles, if it can be called that. The first facial expression she ever makes is a horrid caricature of a grin, scrunched up cheeks and narrowed eyes and entirely too much teeth. There’s no joy in it, it’s a mask of desperation, and Andrea doesn’t understand, she doesn’t _understand_.

\--

She looks through both her expression sheets when she gets home but there’s nothing on the signification of a completely lack of movement. After this she cries a little bit, because she’s tired, because the afternoon without Gro and surrounded by empty desks felt unfathomably long, because she has the most impractical heart and now she has to grieve a love that never happened.

After having gone through a pack of tissues Andrea washes her face and forces herself back into functionality. Making chili for dinner, putting half away for tomorrow’s lunch. Watching tv on her computer while she eats and checking her email one last time before doing the dishes. The image of Gro’s face with the two exposed rows of blunt teeth is on her mind the whole time. She puts her plate and mug on the dish rack, dries the skillet with a paper towel and mentally rewinds every interaction they’ve ever had in search for some point of reference to compare it to.

She’s brushing her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror when she remembers: HugoMorenos posted a third sheet. It had mostly greetings so she only gave it a cursory glance since she and Gro were past that part already, but wasn’t there some other info as well?

Her mouth is cold with the taste of toothpaste-mint while she flips through the heaps of paper on her desk, finding it at last on the floor, swept down by her frantic searching. The front page is as she remembers - greetings and pleasantries only - but she turns it over and there is the not-smile and underneath a caption:

“ _Danger, flee_.”

The fear is like vertigo, like walking down stairs and finding a step missing. The man at her desk. The new faces, the supervisor’s nervousness, the histories that don’t match - they all lose the fuzziness of paranoia, sharpen into reality. She stares at the simple drawing of an eichid showing all their teeth in warning while the pieces of the puzzle arrange themselves in a nearly complete picture.

She grabs a bag, throws in a change of underwear, some toiletries, a bottle of water and the lunch box she prepared earlier. A sweater, all the cash she has on hand. Just this once she’s going with her gut and if turns out she’s just being crazy, well, it’s not like it’s a new thing.

She’s about to call a cab she can’t afford but hesitates. When she sets off for the Grand Archive on foot, she leaves her phone behind.

\--

By the time she arrives, it’s midnight. All the lights are off and the building looms large like the carcass of a prehistoric beast. She swipes her keycard through the slot on one of the backdoors and stay in the doorway for a few moments, holding her breath and listening for any noise or voices, before stepping inside.

The place is empty and the soles of her boots squeaking on the marble floors seems dangerously loud. Andrea holds the bag tightly in her arm, wound up and ready to run, but she doesn’t meet anyone until she gets to her desk, the corridors strange and otherworldly when shrouded in the dark and the silence.

Gro is waiting for her. Her ruff fans out as Andrea approaches but other than this she doesn’t move.

There’s something wrong with the floor around her. It glimmers like the surface of a lake under the stars, and Andrea doesn’t realize what it is until the shards crunch under her feet. The stacks of translated tablets are gone, shattered.

“What have you done?” Andrea asks, horrified, forgetting to be surprised that her wild wager of Gro being here at this hour turned out to be right.

“What I planned,” Gro says. She jumps on top of the nearest desk with an agile speed she’s never shown sign of before and climbs atop the furniture until she’s out of the lake of shards, her bare feet unharmed. “You came here. You understood me.”

“I don’t understand everything, but,” Andrea says. She swallows, heart hammering. “There was never a plague, was there?”

Gro says nothing.

“We killed your people. The planet wasn’t empty, you were here and we killed you.”

The fringe on Gro’s billows. Her eyes are closed when she speaks.

“First, you learned. You came here and watched what we were. When you killed it was the bearers of the history, first, because then you knew we were shattered without them. It was easy after, when we were without leader and light.”

“And the intergalactic court would never have agreed to colonization unless everyone here was extinct, so they, we, covered it up,” Andrea says, and the words crawl like maggots in her mouth but she needs to be the one to say them. “I should have known this.”

“Maybe,” Gro says. “You know now.” She opens her eyes and looks directly into Andrea’s. “You never meant to give us the history and let us grow back strong. I knew it when I came here. I knew also I could take it anyway.

“But,” Andrea says, “you just destroyed all of it.”

“I have it in my head. I have learned it back. I am a bearer now and I will carry us all through the seas,” Gro says, and in the moonlight flooding in through the glass wall her shadow is stark and sharp-lined, her neck is proud like a queen’s.

Andrea looks over the valley of empty desks while her head slowly stops spinning.

“Was the exchange even a real thing?”

“It was real. But a real treachery,” Gro says. “Go look in your computer.”

The broken glass cracks with every step and her fingers trembles typing the password. It’s all up there, once she’s signed in. A detailed log of her destroying the translations. She flinches away from the screen, backs away out of the radius of shards like she could cast off all association of she only got far enough.

“They would say you destroyed and ruined it for vengeance, for when we fought when you took our home. They would provoke us with own hands clean, get us maybe retaliating and then keep the history after all. You would be culprit in name.”

Andrea stares at her. She’s suddenly very angry.

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

“I have been always watched and listened. So have you,” Gro says, a dismissive quiver shaking her. “In the end you understood, you should not be angry.”

It isn’t quite as simple as Gro makes it out to be but Andrea can’t find the energy to argue as the fear comes rushing back.

“They’re... going to come after me. I could get killed!”

Gro takes a step toward her.

“Come with me,” she says, and when Andrea only gapes at her and her inexplicable words she explains, not without impatience: “You know your own, the language and societies. We can use you as we take this planet back.”

“Do you really trust me that much?”

“Maybe.”

Andrea breathes in shakily, breathes out loud.

“Why not just take this alibi and run with it? They’ll say I was the one who destroyed the tablets anyway.”

“Because that-”

Gro closes the distance between them and takes Andrea’s hands in hers, a hard grip. She leans in close and closer and dryly presses their lips together. Her eyes are open the whole time and Andrea is too surprised to shut hers - her entire field of vision is just Gro and Gro alone, the dark shimmer of her irises.

They break apart and Gro asks:

“Was it right?”

“Yes,” Andrea says, to everything.

Gro’s fingers dig into her palms. She has no nails. There is no pain.


End file.
